Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907.
The large oil painting was made in Paris and is now part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York. It depicts five nude figures in a brothel-like setting, using sharply angular bodies, fractured planes, and faces influenced by Iberian sculpture and the visual impact of African and Oceanic art.
Picasso produced hundreds of preparatory drawings and studies before completing the canvas. The work challenged traditional ideals of the nude and helped push European painting toward Cubism, although it is often described more precisely as proto-Cubist. Its radical appearance initially unsettled Picasso’s friends and fellow artists.
The painting was not publicly exhibited immediately. It remained largely within Picasso’s circle until 1916, when it was shown at the Salon d’Antin in Paris. Its current title was adopted to make the original subject—Picasso’s deliberately provocative “brothel” painting—less scandalous. The street name refers to Barcelona’s Carrer d’Avinyó.